Friends,
It has been over a week since I last posted, but that does not mean that progress has slowed. We remain fully engaged in the Samoan tsunami relief and recovery effort.
Our strategy, which was quickly developed in the days immediately following the tsunami, is three fold (one part relief, two parts reconstruction). First we were determined to get immediate and helpful aid out to those who were the most severely devastated by the tsunami. SPBD, along with several other agencies, played a critical role in this successful endeavour. This phase of immediate relief is now drawing to a close. The government is now well positioned to directly help those who are without access to drinking water or proper sanitation and they are putting in the long term required infrastructure to support these people in need and have set up the short term systems to provide them with adequate access to drinking water and sanitation. Most of the immediate health concerns have also been adequately addressed by the Red Cross and the government.
The next phase is to help families and communities to restore their devastated villages and to re-launch local village economies. The United Nations Disaster Management Office has appointed SPBD as the head of the committee for “Restoring Livelihoods in Post-Tsunami Samoa” There are several other agencies working on this committee with us including Oxfam, AusAid and the Asian Development Bank.
The first element of SPBD’s restoring livelihoods program is to launch a “Cash-for-Work” program in eight highly impacted villages. This will involve:
- Working with local villages to identify and scope out important projects that need to be completed to help restore each village.
- Assembling local work-forces to carry out the work
- Providing these teams of workers with the proper tools, equipment and management oversight and.
- Paying the workers a reasonable wage at the end of each week for their efforts.
Essentially this program has two large positive developmental impacts:
- It gets important clean up projects completed quickly, and
- It helps to inject cash back into the local communities via earned wages so that the local economies can once again begin to function.
The second element of our restoring livelihoods strategy is to provide large scale re-financing facilities to families to help them rebuild their destroyed micro-businesses and/or homes. This financing will get families back on track to being fully empowered to solve their own immediate income and housing problems. It also dovetails very nicely with the Cash-for-Work program. Local workers will gain an income and be able to support newly establish local businesses. Essentially we’re helping to re-launch entirely new local economies.
And so that is what we have been doing. The first two “Cash-for-Work” village programs will be rolled out this Monday (Oct 26th). Perhaps that is enough for now. I will continue to keep you updated as we move forward. Once again, thanks to the hundreds of individuals who have supported SPBD’s efforts on the ground in Samoa through either of our major funding partners – MicroDreams (www.microdreams.org) and/or Mercy Corps (www.mercycorps.org). Your support is making a big difference.
All the best,
Greg